


the snow glows white on the mountain tonight

by Haberdasher



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Cold, Cold Weather, Gen, Guilt, Hypothermia, Missions Gone Wrong, Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, POV Female Character, POV Original Character, Pokemon Death, Pokemon Fanfiction, Rangers, Rescue Missions, Self-Doubt, Snow, Snow and Ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22093621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: Anjali, a Ranger for the mountain town of Odonton, volunteers for a solo rescue mission in the middle of a snowstorm where things go south fast.
Kudos: 6
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	the snow glows white on the mountain tonight

It wasn't uncommon for Ranger duty in Odonton to occasionally involve rescuing the stray lost hiker or Trainer or other visitor to the town, and those instances of strangers getting rescued by Rangers only grew in number during the winter. One would think that the frigid temperatures of Odonton in winter would scare away tourists, or at least cause them to exercise a bit of common sense as they ascended towards the mountain town, but unfortunately, that didn't seem to actually be the case.

The details were a little fuzzy for this particular rescue, but that wasn't terribly uncommon, truth be told. What the Rangers did know was that a Trainer had been heading towards Odonton and got caught in a snowstorm (not uncommon for the time of year, but this one was a bit harsher than normal, and certainly would be a wake-up call to any unfamiliar with mountain weather), didn't have proper equipment for the weather, and was currently stationary in a known location, with attempts at contact proving fruitless.

When they had asked if any Ranger wanted to volunteer for the mission, Anjali jumped on the opportunity. She'd never done a rescue mission like that before, only heard about them second-hand from other Rangers, and she relished the opportunity to show what she was capable of doing on her own for once. (She was a full Ranger, but still a little green around the gills, and she felt like the other Rangers judged her for it.) If all went well, it would be a feather in her hat, something to brag about over Christmas dinner.

Anjali still felt good about volunteering for the mission as she prepared to head out of the Ranger station, donning the several layers of clothing needed to brave the Odonton winter and the gear she'd have on hand for the rescue mission. She was a bit low on tech, but then, she knew the mountains around Odonton well, knew exactly where she was heading, snowstorm or no snowstorm. And it was true, the trek down to where the Trainer in need of rescuing was located wasn't a terribly difficult one, at least for Anjali. The only thing that made her slightly apprehensive about the whole thing was that her own footprints disappeared quickly as the snow swirled and shifted in the unrelenting winds, and that those of the Trainer she was seeking out were already long gone. She wouldn't know where he had been, if there was any particular danger besides the obvious to be aware of, and she couldn't simply retrace her footsteps to return to the Ranger station, either.

Anjali got a sinking feeling in her stomach as she approached the Trainer. He was wearing bright clothes, which made him stand out well from the blanket of snow that covered the mountains, growing ever-thicker as the winter dragged on, but his outfit was otherwise very ill-conceived. He was wearing worn-down sneakers rather than any proper kind of hiking boot, and while he had one jacket on, it was flimsy, more of a windbreaker than a real winter coat.  
  
What had he been _thinking_?

Even Anjali herself, wrapped in layer upon layer of thick winter clothing, could feel a bit of a chill as the storm began to pick up, could faintly feel the wind and the snow pressing against her as she got closer to the Trainer, hoping to examine him more closely. If she, bundled up for the winter weather as best she could be, could feel the cold... well, it wasn't a good sign for the Trainer, at any rate.

The Trainer wasn't moving, not even the slight motions of his chest rising and falling in order to breathe, but Anjali knew enough to know that wasn't _necessarily_ proof that he was gone for good, though it certainly wasn't a good sign. The age-old mantra that "they aren't dead unless they're _warm_ and dead" was one that Anjali had heard time and time again as part of her Ranger training, and, well, they were both far from warm now, out in the winter snow.

Anjali should have known that, without breathing present, the odds of finding a pulse were slim to none, but all she could remember from relevant medical training was that after breathing came checking circulation, forgetting the reason behind why one came before the other...  
  
...and she couldn't check his pulse through her thick winter gloves, now, could she?  
  
That was the thinking that lead Anjali to take off one glove, anyway. Just the one, on her right hand; you didn't need two hands to take someone's pulse, after all. 

Anjali regretted the move instantly as the cold that her thick winter clothes had been keeping out suddenly assaulted her hand at full force. She knew the risks of winter well enough, knew what that kind of cold could do to a person.  
  
She was, after all, looking at one example of what that kind of cold could do to a person.  
  
But she had already taken the glove off, so it felt like there was nothing left to do but follow through on her half-thought-out rationale behind it... 

As Anjali's bare hand gripped the uncovered wrist of the fallen Trainer, his skin was nearly as icy and frigid to the touch as his current surroundings.  
  
There was no pulse.  
  
Of _course_ there was no pulse.  
  
Anjali mentally kicked herself as she removed her hand from his wrist. Checking for a pulse had been a bad idea from the beginning, and all it had done now was risk giving her frostbite as she continued the rescue mission.

Anjali shoved her right hand back into her glove as quickly as she could, but the cold still burned her fingers in the long seconds before she could complete the motion, and some pessimistic part of her kept wondering if even that brief moment of exposure might be enough to give her frostbite.  
  
It'd serve her right, really, for not thinking straight, for removing a piece of clothing in the middle of a snowstorm in order to try something that she should have known was pointless to begin with... 

Too late to take it back now, though. The glove was back on, at least, and if she got frostbite from her brief uncovered exposure to the chill of Odonton winter, well, maybe she deserved it.  
  
Her right hand didn't feel the numbness of frostbite at the moment, though, at least not any more so than the rest of her did. It felt cold still, cold and slightly prickly, but if that was the worst that it got, that was nothing to be too concerned about.

It was only after all of this that Anjali realized the pulseless Trainer wasn't the only potential victim on the scene here, that he wasn't the only one she had to be concerned about.  
  
There was a Marowak splayed out on the ground a few feet from him, still touching an egg that was presumably her own, a thin layer of snow having helped to obscure the Pokemon from Anjali's sight until that very moment.

Anjali sucked in a deep breath of ice-cold air as she considered her next move. She'd never had a Pokemon of her own, and it showed; she knew far less about Pokemon first aid than she did about human first aid, and her actions in the last few minutes had proved that she was a little shaky even when it came to the latter. With humans she could check breathing, look for a pulse, but for Pokemon, Anjali wasn't even sure where to start.  
  
The Marowak clearly wasn't moving, though, which had to be a bad sign.

As for the egg... well, Anjali knew even less about caring for them than she did about caring for hatched Pokemon, but it was small--worryingly small, in a way, because the smaller it was, the less grown it probably was, and the more likely it was that exposure to the frigid Odonton mountain air would harm the egg for good, even if Anjali managed to pull off a miracle and get all involved parties back inside somewhere warm sooner rather than later, and she knew better than that.

The upside of the egg being so warm, though, was that it would be easier to heat up, given a suitable heating source...  
  
Anjali walked over to where the egg lay on the ground and grabbed it, taking it away from its mother's hands; the Marowak offered no resistance, showed no sign of recognition that Anjali was even there.  
  
If the egg had any warmth left in it after so long out in the cold, Anjali couldn't feel it through her gloves, and she at least knew better than to take them off _again_.

The snowstorm was getting fiercer by the minute, Anjali was sure of it; the wind whipped through her, her thick winter clothes unable to fully shield her from the violent gusts that blew to and fro, and snowflakes kept landing not only on her clothes but on _her_ , managing to find the smallest of crevices in between her layers of clothes and sink into her body, leaving her skin cold and wet as her body heat melted them one by one.

If the weather kept up like this--and there was no reason to believe that it was about to let up, that Anjali would be miraculously spared from the snowstorm she had volunteered to brave, that the worst of the Odonton winter weather would give way to sunshine and warmth--Anjali wasn't sure if she'd be able to make it back to the Ranger station without help, and she knew that if she tried doing so while lugging around an unconscious Trainer, Marowak, and egg with her, she would just become another victim of the storm.

The alternative, though, was riding out the storm, and that wasn't an especially appealing thought, either. Creating a makeshift shelter in the snow could save lives, but Anjali knew well enough that it could take them as well, especially if the shelters weren't well-constructed, if the person making them didn't know what they were doing... and while Anjali had been trained on how to go about making such shelters as part of her Ranger training, she still wasn't entirely sure that she knew what she was doing.

Given the current situation, though, it seemed like making a shelter in which to ride out the snow, imperfect though it was bound to be, was better than the alternative.  
  
At least the mountains around Odonton had plenty of snow to work with. Good packing snow, too, when Anjali tested it, shaping easily when she tried molding a chunk of it within her hand. (Her right hand, specifically, which perhaps had been a mistake. It might have been her imagination, or aftereffects of her previous bout with the cold, but she could swear that she felt the cold of the snow seeping into her fingers, though her glove was still on her hand and not coming off any time soon.) 

Building a snow cave big enough to hold everybody it needed to hold, however, was easier said than done, especially in the middle of a snowstorm, and especially as Anjali was starting to feel her extremities going numb, which she knew was a bad sign and an omen of worse things to come. Her first attempt at building a shelter unceremoniously collapsed after standing for less than a minute, leaving just another unexceptional pile of snow in its wake.

The second snow cave remained stable, but when Anjali tried to drag the unconscious, unmoving Trainer into it, she found that she was unable to move him from his current place even slightly. Perhaps he was frozen stuck to the frigid, snow-covered ground that surrounded them both; perhaps Anjali's own strength was giving out as she spent longer and longer in the cold. Either way, her plan was once again going to have to be modified.

Anjali went for the Marowak next, but she too was frozen to the ground, unable to be moved from where she had first fallen from exposure. The snowstorm was getting stronger, Anjali thought, and with it visibility was lessening, and that numbness she had felt earlier was started to climb its way up her limbs...  
  
Whatever she did next, she would have to do it fast.

Anjali wondered, briefly, what her coworkers were doing as she stood here and shivered, the cold too vast for even the warmest of winter weather gear to keep out.  
  
Were they all hanging out in the station, bright and warm and content as she fought through the bitter cold alone? (At her own request, of course. She'd volunteered to do this mission, asked to go it alone. What a fool she'd been.)  
  
Would they notice if she didn't come back in time... or at all?  
  
One way or another, Anjali had a feeling she was going to find out the hard way.

Anjali reached for the egg, half-expecting it to be frozen to the ground and immobile like the Trainer and Marowak were, but no, it yielded and moved with the gentlest pressure that Anjali could give with hands frost-numbed as they were.  
  
She couldn't get the Trainer and his Marowak into her newly-built snow cave, and waiting outside of it with them was just asking for trouble, but the egg...  
  
Maybe she could save the egg from the worst of the bitter cold.  
  
Maybe she could manage to accomplish at least one small rescue, at least, if not the one she had been called here for in the first place.  
  
It was worth a shot, wasn't it?

Anjali grabbed the egg and it's cold, she knows it even though her fingertips can't feel it, can't feel anything anymore, but still she brings the egg into the snow cave with her. It's small enough that carrying it isn't a burden, but she still would have done it just the same if it were. Anjali doesn't mind taking on burdens, especially since she's the one who asked to go save people out in the middle of the Odonton winter in the first place.  
  
She just can't do the impossible... and her mind's starting to accept that, at least here and now and with the limited resources that she has (because she turned down ones that would have been more help, of course), saving the Trainer and his Marowak might well be just that.

It feels warm, once Anjali gets inside the snow cave, egg in tow. Not just less cold than the frigid winter weather to be found outside the snow cave, but truly, genuinely _warm_.  
  
Even now, as her mind's starting to fog over and bits and pieces of her Ranger training are slipping out of reach, Anjali is all too aware that that's a bad, bad sign.  
  
The snow cave may be better than staying outside, but it can only protect her from the worst, not fend off an ongoing case of hypothermia on its own. If her coworkers don't notice her absence, if nobody comes looking for her, all a bit of shelter will do is stave off the inevitable.

The warmth becomes less noticeable once Anjali brings the egg closer to her, though. Resting the egg upon her chest made her realize how cold it really was--almost as cold as the snow that surrounded them, as the winter winds she was doing her best to avoid.  
  
What if this egg was already unviable, and all she was doing by trying to save it was losing some of her own precious heat in the process?  
  
Anjali thought she felt something in the egg move slightly, but she might well have been imagining it.  
  
Anjali brought the egg even closer, covering it with some of her layers of clothes as her shivering grew more violent. If this was going to be the end of her, she'd be glad to have her last act be desperately trying to save the unsavable, even at the cost of her own life. That was as good a way to go as any, she figured. 

Anjali lay down. Here in the snow cave, the snowstorm outside was barely noticeable, though she could hear the wind blowing if she listened hard enough. Here in the snow cave it was warm and calm and peaceful and quite possibly the place where Anjali would live her final moments if she wasn't lucky.  
  
There were worse places to go.  
  
She'd brought it on herself, too. If she'd let someone more experienced take this mission, or gone with a partner, she wouldn't be here. Whatever happened to her would be the consequences of her own hubris, of her determination to prove herself outweighing common sense.

Anjali knew that she should fight to stay awake and alert, but knowing it and actually doing it were two separate things. After the chaos of dealing with the snowstorm outside, laying here in the snow cave was so relaxing, and everything in her body was telling her to just slow down, take it easy, save her energy...  
  
...and yes, it was a trap, and yes, giving in might be the last decision she ever made, but...  
  
...but what else was left for her to do?  
  
Anjali hugged the egg tightly as she closed her eyes and slowly but surely drifted off to sleep, well aware that she might never wake up. 


End file.
